Mexico's
federal police bloodily repressed
demonstrators in Oaxaca during the
February 2011 visit to
the city by President Felipe
Calderón, leaving a toll of 15
wounded. (Foto:
Baldomero Robles/Noticias )

Forge a Revolutionary Workers
Party!

MAY 7 – Today the
convoy of the March for Peace with Justice and
Dignity, headed by the poet Javier Silicia,
arrives in Mexico City. The mobilization will
culminate tomorrow with a rally in the
Zócalo, Mexico City’s monumental
central square. Spurred by the March 28 murder
of the poet’s son in Cuernavaca, Sicilia’s
mobilization has garnered broad support.
Parallel protests are scheduled tomorrow in
more than 20 Mexican cities, along with
various actions at a numbr of Mexican consular
offices abroad. This mobilization has
intersected a growing clamor against the
violence that has intensified since Felipe
Calderón’s rise to power, which in the
last four years has brought a bloody toll of
over 40,000 dead. Just in the month of April,
some 145 bodies were discovered in hidden
graves in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, the same
city where in August of last year the bodies
of 72 migrants were discovered, most of them
from Central America.

In the past few days,
columnists from various newspapers have called
on readers to join the demonstration.
Yesterday, the Mexican Conference of Bishops
announced its support, blaming
“narcotrafficking and organized crime” (but
not the government). Even President
Calderón of the right-wing National
Action Party (PAN) saluted the demonstration
as “a civic expression.” Various labor
organizations have joined the call, including
the Mexican Union of Electrical Workers (SME).
Reflecting the mobilization of such diverse
sectors, there are differing accounts as to
the nature of this “movement,” among them the
“No más sangre” (No more blood)
initiative of the cartoonist “Rius” (Eduardo
del Río) supported by the Movement of
National Regeneration (MORENA), that of
Sicilia himself, more non-partisan, and that
of the leftist Metropolitan Coordination
Against Militarization and Violence (COMECON)
in the Federal District. Nevertheless, what
all these elements have in common is their
classless appeals for peace – or against
violence – instead of proclaiming the need for
class war against the government and all wings
of the bourgeoisie.

Sicilia stated quite
explicitly that “we are not against the
government,” that “the mobilization is to make
demands on the government, not to bring it
down,” and that he proposes to repair the
“fabric of society,” as quoted in La
Jornada (6 May). He also says that
“right now we have a co-opted state that
necessarily must be reformed from within,”
that it is necessary to “remake the public
institutions,” etc. Sicilia wants the state to
“do its job,” as he said yesterday when he
headlined a protest in Topilejo: “We must
learn to be citizens, to demand that the
rulers and the misnamed ‘political class’ do
their duty” (La
Jornada, 7 May). Our view as proletarian
revolutionaries is exactly the opposite: we
insist that what is needed is for the
capitalist state to be brought down, since it
is the source of the violence against the
exploited and oppressed.

Other elements are
trying to connect up with the wave of
indignation unleashed by the assassination of
Sicilia’s son, while offering it a more
leftist gloss. While the League of Workers for
Socialism (LTS) denounces the drug war and
militarization, the Socialist Workers Party
(POS), followers of the late Argentine
pseudo-Trotskyist Nahauel Moreno, repeat
Sicilia’s slogan “we’re fed up” in an
editorial in El Socialista, and call
for the formation of a “great front of
struggle” against insecurity and unemployment.
With their cries of “down with Calderón,” the
program of these organizations that claim to
be socialist is perfectly compatible with that
of MORENA, which is the current brand-name of
the popular front around the figure of
Andrés Manuel López Obrador,
popularly known by his initials AMLO. When
they lay the blame on the government, it is
only in preparation for López Obrador’s
2012 election campaign. Ultimately,
all of them have the same program of calling
on the state to stop violence.

Regardless of their
talk of struggling against militarization and
the police state that is hanging over the
country, it is impossible to do this as part
of a movement “against violence,” “for peace,”
or whatever one might call it. When the POS
denounces “insecurity” or the COMECON (of
which the LTS is a member) calls for “an end
to violence and impunity,” they take the side,
even if only implicitly, of the bourgeois
state, because they don’t stand on the only
possible alternative: a workers movement
fighting to take power. They thereby help to
drum up the “anti-crime” hysteria with which
the government wants to justify the
militarization of the country.

In reality, the
current “war on drugs” is not a war between
the government and the drug traffickers, but a
fight among
sectors of the ruling class for the
control of territories and markets. If it is
carried out with arms, instead of with
lawsuits and “price wars,” this is on account
of the peculiarities of the business of moving
and distributing prohibited substances and
“illegal” immigrants. The commercial entities
engaged in this business (the Gulf cartel, La
Familia, Los Zetas, etc.) could not exist
without their ties to the state. Moreover, the
biggest organized crime syndicate is the
capitalist state itself. When the media refer
to “organized crime,” are they by any chance
talking about the gift of Telmex (the former
state telephone monopoly) to Carlos Slim? Or
the concession of the mines to the Grupo
México, the company of the infamous
Germán Larrea[1]?
Or the protection granted by PAN governments
to those guilty of the unending industrial
homicide of miners, from Pasta de
Conchos and now Sabinas in Coahuila, to the
mines of Sonora, Guerrero and Jalisco?

At moments of
intensified class struggle, revolutionary
communists call for the formation of workers
self-defense groups, a slogan that is
absent from the propaganda of the opportunist
leftists who partake in the movement “against
violence.” We raised this slogan in Oaxaca in
2006 and in union struggles from Lázaro
Cárdenas[2]
to the SME[3].
But in the end, the only way to put an end to
the violence perpetrated by the state and the
ruling class is by means of a social
revolution. All attempts at “reform,” at
“democratic” control of the police, at
supervision over the police, of calling for
the jailing of the uniformed assassins, are
doomed to failure, because the bourgeoisie
needs its repressive machine, the backbone of
its state.

We wrote
(“Militarization and Hunger in Mexico,” The
Internationalist No. 28, March-April
2009) that while under the seven-decades rule
of the Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI), “Mexican governments maintained control
through the all-encompassing mechanisms of a
corporatist regime,” since 2000 the “ultimate
recourse” of PAN governments “is greater use
of the military, bringing Mexico closer to
militarized pseudo-democracies like Colombia.”
This is not a peculiarity of the PAN. It would
be the same under any bourgeois party (PRD,
PRI, PT[4],
Greens, Convergencia[5],
etc.) U.S. imperialism’s “silent invasion” of
the country would also continue, with its
hundreds of agents who are an integral part of
this militarization.

Moreover, “peace”
movements end up helping bonapartist elements
who promise to put an end to crime and
violence with forceful repression. In a note
in La
Jornada of 3 May, Luis Hernández
Navarro[6]
insists that the May 8 march is quite
different from the mobilization in 2004, when
prominent right-wing politicians launched an
anti-violence movement, in the midst of a wave
of kidnappings of bourgeois figures. It is
true that there is a certain difference: that
was a rightist movement while this is a
popular-frontist “progressive” one.
Nevertheless, if this movement achieves any
power, it will have to base itself on the same
capitalist state, and will end up reinforcing
it, although with a “leftist” vocabulary.

There is ample
historical precedent for movements of this
sort, notably in Italy, where the left has
sought to oppose the corruption and violence
that flourished under center-right (Christian
Democracy) governments. Even when they
succeeded in installing a center-left
government, such as in the “historic
compromise” of Aldo Moro[7]
with the PCI in the 1970s, or more recently in
the government of l’Unione[8],
which included Rifondazione Comunista[9],
and the results were disastrous. In the case
of the “Historic Compromise,” the slogans
“against violence” prepared “public opinion”
for support a witchhunt (with the PCI in
charge of the police!) against leftist
radicals, including rank and file union
committees and veteran anti-fascist partisans.
Later, the “leftist” Unione government
participated in the occupation of Afghanistan,
and wound up paving the way for the far-right
Berlusconi government with its bonapartist
tendencies. (See “Italy:
Popular Front of Imperialist War and
Anti-Labor Attacks” in The
Internationalist No. 25,
January-February 2007).

In the case of
Mexico, the militarization of the country and
the thousands of deaths under the current
six-year presidencial term are the expression
of the war of the capitalists against the
workers and the poor. Taking the reins of the
state amidst massive plebeian mobilizations
protesting the electoral fraud that gave him
his “victory,” Calderón overtly based
himself on the armed forces. Seemingly
infatuated with dressing up in military
fatigues and soldier’s cap while reviewing the
troops, Calderón intensified the
bonapartist tendencies of the regime,
announcing that there would be less carrots
and a lot more sticks for the population.
Today, these same pressures manifest
themselves in the push to approve the
“reforms” of the National Security Law, which
would give “special powers” to the executive
to impose martial law in regions “threatened
by ungovernability.” In the end, these
measures aren’t directed against the
narcotraffickers, but against those who would
dare to protest against the government and its
policies of starvation and union-busting.

Against the
fraudulent “war on drug trafficking” we call
for elimination
of all laws that prohibit or regulate the
consumption and selling of drugs. It’s
none of the state’s business what anyone wants
to do with their own body. Against harassment
by criminal gangs in competition – and
sometimes in cooperation – with police forces,
targeted against migrants who cross Mexico
heading for the northern border, it is
necessary to fight for full
citizenship rights for all immigrants,
in Mexico as well as in the U.S. We fight for
the expulsion
of all imperialist agents. But the most
important thing is to underline that the only
real way out of capitalist barbarity is revolutionary
struggle for a workers and peasants
government, extending beyond the borders in
an international socialist revolution.
The necessary instrument for achieving this
task is a revolutionary
workers
party that would act as a tribune of the
people, defending all the oppressed. ■

[1]
Larrea is the owner of the Pasta de
Conchos mine in the state of Coahuila,
where 65 miners were buried alive in 2006.

[2]
Site of Mexico’s largest steel plant, in
the state of Michoacán, where in
April 2006 workers drove off a joint
attack by thousands ofstate
and federal police and the Mexican navy.

[3]
In October 2009, the Calderón
government dissolved the Luz y Fuerza del
Centro (LyFC) company and fired all 44,000
of its employees.

[4]
PT, a fake “Labor Party” set up by the PRI
corporatist apparatus under president
Carlos Salinas, now often allied with the
PRD and López Obrador.

[5]
Convergence for Democracy, a bourgeois
liberal party, part of the López
Obrador popular front.

[7]
Aldo Moro (1916-1978), leader of the
Catholic/Mafia “Christian Democratic” (DC)
party, the historic party of post-war
Italian capitalism, who accepted the offer
of Italian Communist Party (PCI) secretary
Enrico Berlinguer for a “historic
compromise” for “national solidarity”
between the two parties in the 1970s.
Previously the Cold War raison
d’être of the DC was to keep
the Communists out of the Italian
government.

[8]
L’Unione, the coalition behind the second
government of Romano Prodi (2006-2008).

[9]
Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (PRC,
Party of Communist Refoundation), founded
by dissidents from the Stalinist PCI who
split in 1991 when the party abandoned any
vestigial pretense of communism and
renamed itself the Democratic Party (PD).